On the Hevel Level - A Blog About Nothing

When it comes to words that are frequently used in church contexts, sometimes it is necessary to step back and parse what a word really means.  Holy is one of these words.  In what follows, I’d like to offer a brief description of the word holy and then examine the word through some illustrations that are intended to open a new lens to look at scripture through. Holy has to do with categories.  If something is “holy”, that means it belongs in the category of special or unique.  Often the pitfall has been to focus on moral goodness or purity when the word is used.  While the word can often carry this significance, that understanding is secondary.  One way to better understand a word is to look at its opposite. For holy, the opposite is not ‘evil’, but ‘common’.  As a simple illustration, the Sabbath is understood to be a holy day.  If evil was holy’s opposite, the Sabbath would be holy and the rest of the days of the week would be evil.  The...

A question many ask is this; “Is God with me?” For the orthodox Christian, the theological answer is simple. “God is omnipresent, so yes, he is with you.” But orthodox claims aside, is that commonly what we experience? Do we always know that God is with us or do we from time to time find ourselves intimidated by circumstance in the world around us? If that happens (and I know it does in my life), this would suggest at times we struggle to hold on to the reality of God always being present with us. Several years ago, I was learning my first few Hebrew words. I remember starting to put a few together. I learned “ eem ” is “with”. Next, “ anu ” is a pronoun for “us” that attaches to words. In this way “ eemanu ” means “with us”. Then I realized when you add “ El ” to the mix, one of the words for God, you get “ eem-anu-el ” or “God with us”. I learned that Immanuel means “God with us” and was excited by this new discovery. In reality, I had known that Immanuel means “God with us” for...

Hevel  is a Hebrew word meaning: Breath; by extension:  something with no substance, meaningless, worthlessness, vanity, emptiness, futility; idol.  Breath; futility; meaninglessness; temporality; vanity; worthless.

Can you imagine being dropped in the middle of a nation in great turmoil, fighting to re-find its own identity? On the one hand, it might appear that insurmountable social and political forces are at work that would make the task of rediscovering the country’s God given roots seem impossible. At the same time, one could look at some of the resources in play and imagine renewal as a great nation possible. One of the clear challenges is the lack of agreement between factions on how to go about it. On one side of the political spectrum you find one group who insists that faithful keeping of God’s scriptures always results in God’s blessing.  Those focuses on persuading people to understand that if the nation collectively follows God, the blessings he had promised would come to pass.   There’s a subgroup within this group who agree with this point of view but also think that it stops short of necessary action.  In their fervor, they purs...

The Book of Daniel was recently preached through in the church I attend. I appreciated that the pastor went through the whole book and was willing to engage in all the chapters - even the ones with apocalyptic material. Because “Apocalyptic”, as a genre in its Second Temple period form (roughly 530 BCE to 70 CE), is not readily produced today, we often don’t know what to do with it. I want to ask the question, "can we engage in hope in an apocalyptic fashion today?” In order to be able to answer the question, it would be helpful to talk about what apocalyptic is.  Besides the well-known apocalyptic texts within the Bible (especially Daniel and Revelation), there are apocalyptic texts outside of the canon of scripture. These include Esdras (aka 4 Ezra), Apocalypse of Abraham, Apocalypse of Moses as well as at least a couple dozen others. The word itself just means unveiling or revelation. If we go with a genre description from the Anchor Bible Dictionary, it explains tha...